I really want a Roomba. I suspect it would scare our free range turtles. So I won’t get one. But I’d actually really like five. Because then I could re-enact this re-enactment of Pacman. Using Roombas.
Australian Roombas are marketed as iRobots. Which is a bit Will Smith if you ask me… only I can’t imagine a Roomba ever turning on humans and killing them. How would it? What’s it going to do? Suck my face off?
It seems that despite my wife’s protestations to the contrary I am not the only person in the world who struggles with this activity.
Life in country Australia is pretty peachy. It’s just a shame that we can’t seem to convince Sydneysiders of that fact…
This topic of conversation always gets me in trouble in Christian circles – so I apologise in advance for the offense I’m about to cause you city dwellers. I know some of you know people who are going to regional Australia. I know some of you are keen to go overseas. I know some of you have good reasons to stay in Sydney and feel “called” to do so – but if everybody is “called” to be in Sydney you’ve got to start questioning where the calling is coming from…
My friend Mike, a minister in a regional centre in Queensland, posted a fairly innocuous appeal to city ministers as his status yesterday. And he got in trouble.
I’m going to play the role of cavalry.
This is what he said: Mike wants to remind my friends that the mission field is bigger than Sydney!
He copped a bit of a comment flogging. He was accused of empire building. Which I thought was odd. Mike is from Sydney. His family live there. He’s traditional Sydney staying fodder. And he left. Much respect to him…
And this old chestnut came up:
Australia’s population is not evenly spread – almost 1 in 5 Aussies live here. It would make sense then that 1 in five workers is here also. (There may be more than that I’m not sure).
Newsflash – that means 4 in 5 people in Australia aren’t in Sydney. Sadly two out of four of Australia’s reformed evangelical training institutions are in Sydney. I would suggest that more than 1 in 5 reformed evangelical workers are in Sydney.
Someone somewhere should do some research – but anecdotally speaking – I’d say there are only a handful of graduates from either Moore College or SMBC in Queensland. I’d say the case is similar in other states.
Off the top of my head there are only about 15 graduates from these colleges operating in Queensland (but this is largely limited to Presbyterian circles). That’s a rough head count.
According to this site Sydney occupies about 2100 square kilometres. According to this site Australia is 7,686,850 square kilometres.
I know there’s this big “theological” push to do city based ministry – but really, our regional towns are the size of Biblical cities in some cases.
Can someone tell me how we’re meant to reach the other 4 in 5 people in that sort of space with the concentration of good ministry stuff we’ve got going on in Sydney?
Jon Acuff at Stuff Christians Like has turned a good idea into a book deal, notoriety, and one of the Christian blogosphere’s most popular blogs.
This week he’s turned his blog into a money raising powerhouse – securing $30,000 in donations for a new Vietnamese orphanage in about 18 hours.
That’s pretty awesome.
Abraham Piper helped out with an interview – and has announced that this week he’ll be focused on raising money for worthy causes – starting with child sponsorship.
I like these ideas. So much that I’m setting up a Tear Really Useful Gift Shop as an experiment. I’d like to buy goats and cows for villages in the hope that they’ll be called Eutychus.
Click here to buy a really useful gift. Prices start at $5 for fish farms. I don’t expect anyone to buy a cow for $300. But it’s an animal, so I included it in the store – along with some vegetarian options.
If you want to donate part of a cow let me know in the comments.
Mmm, microbial toys… I’ve posted some of these before – but this one is swine flu. So it’s topical. And cool.
This should probably say “I survived the Large Hadron Collider courtesy of the time travelling saviours“…
But it’s a cool shirt, and somewhat timely.
Seriously though. Powerpoint slides have been scientifically proven to be better with less information rather than more…
Here’s the test they ran…
Students were randomly assigned to two groups. One group attended a presentation with traditional bullet-point slides (with the occasional diagram) and the second group attended a presentation with what Chris calls “sparse slides”, which contained the same diagrams, but minimized the amount of text, and broke up the information over several different slides. Both presentations were accompanied by the same spoken narrative.
They were tested using multiple choice questions and then short essays – the multiple choice tests showed no major differences between the groups. The essays on the other hand…
“Before marking the short essay answers, Chris worked with two independent people to identify the themes of information in the presentation. They identified around 30 themes by consensus. The short essay answers were then marked by counting how many of those themes the students wrote about.”
Now that you’re convinced on the science here are the tips from the study.
There are millions of tips for good writing online – but what if you want to be the next Dan Brown?
You need bad writing tips – and this website is here to help – replete with sample passages.
Here are my favourite tips – click the link for the posts (including samples)…
If you invert the tips you also get a pretty good guide to good writing.
I love a good bear mauling story. Like Elisha and the rude youths.
This one is pretty awesome (except for the part where people die – but they were terrorists). A bunch of militants in India were hiding out in a cave.
The militants had made their hideout in a cave which was actually the bear’s den, said police officer Farooq Ahmed.
The dead have been identified as Mohammad Amin alias Qaiser, and Bashir Ahmed alias Saifullah.
News of the attack emerged when their injured comrade went to a nearby village for treatment.
Do it yourself weaponry looks fun, but short of making a few glove guns as a child I haven’t really made anything…
These are inspiring. If you’ve got other DIY weapons YouTube videos (especially explosive ones) post them in the comments…
I found these here – where there are a few more trebuchet videos.
I love Lifehacker’s tips. Especially the odd ones that make you wonder how people came up with them.
There are a plethora of odd tips and tricks out there on the Interwebs. Here are three of my favourites.
1. Put your breaking harddrive in the freezer.
“Many hard drive failures are caused by worn parts that no longer align properly, making it impossible to read data from the drive. Lowering the drive’s temperature causes its metal and plastic internals to contract ever so slightly. Taking the drive out of the freezer, and returning it to room temperature can cause those parts to expand again.”
2. Put your broken video card in the oven.
“Solder joints sometimes crack over time, cutting the connections between electronic components and causing hardware failure. Expose those joints to constant heat, in an oven set to 200 to 275 degrees centigrade, and the lead will melt, clearing out any cracks and reconnecting the joints. After the card has seen enough baking, leave it to cool for a few hours, and it should be working once back in a computer.”
3. Put your drenched mobile phone in rice.
“Use a desiccant to wick away any leftover moisture. The most convenient choice is uncooked rice. Just leave the phone (and its disconnected battery) submerged in a bowl of grains overnight. If you’re worried about rice dust getting inside your phone, you can instead use the packets of silica gel that often come stuffed in the pockets of new clothes. But acting fast is far more important than avoiding a little dust, so don’t waste time shopping if you don’t already have a drawer full of silica gel.”
Here’s an interesting statistical breakdown of “match percentages” through OKCupid, an online dating service, based on indicated religious affiliation and level of seriousness.
It’s worth a read for no reason other than that it’s kind of interesting. There are a few other factors considered throughout the piece too.
“All OkCupid users create their own matching algorithms, so when we determine who matches who, we’re just crunching the numbers people give us. A match percentage between two people is a condensed, yet statistically valid, expression of how well they might get along.”
“In short, our method is this: we host an ever-changing database of user-submitted questions, covering every imaginable topic, from spirituality to dental hygiene. To build their own match algorithms, our users answer as many questions as they please (the average is about 230). When answering a question, a user also picks her how her ideal match would answer and how important the question is to her. It’s very simple, and it removes all subjectivity on our part. We simply crunch the numbers.”
Here’s a table. The average “match percentage” is 60.2%.
Here’s a list of 140 questions you might face in a job interview at Google.
My answer to all of these questions would be “let me google that for you”…
Via CafeDave.
The New York Times has an infographic today exploring the impact of the GFC on different age groups and demographics in America. It’s pretty fascinating. But it probably doesn’t directly translate to employment in Australia.
Men in America are sitting at an unemployment rate of 9.0% across all demographics, while women are at 7.3%.
College graduates fair remarkably better than non-college graduates, and people over 45 report much better employment rates than younger workers.
I assume this looks at people who want to be in work and aren’t though. Which is the traditional measure of unemployment – despite what some stupid government departments might suggest. Yeah, I’m looking straight at the ones who take the total workforce and subtract it from the total population…
If it did I’d be fairing well – as would people like me – with only 3.9% of white, 25 year old (and over) males with university degrees looking for work.
